Posts Tagged ‘Fed’

Pretty charts by the IMF which make no sense to the newly impoverished in developing countries. After three years of G20 meetings to produce a new 'global harmony', the system is still intact: a mixture of deregulation, princely rewards for the brains behind 'financial innovations' and destruction paid for by state and taxpayer.

In the 2011 May issue of Le Monde Diplomatique, the comment ‘Immune and all-powerful’ by vetern observer of 20th century absurdity, Serge Halimi, is short, blunt and a new indictment of the global financial mafia. This mafia is represented on governments by its criminals-in-chief: Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and J P Morgan. There are more such criminals-in-chief of course, and some are regional (in Russia, China, India, Brazil) as they preside over the movements of capital and the passing of legislation to disempower, impoverish and enslave tens of millions around the developing world.

It is in the interests of these folk, the humble wage earners in field and in the slums, that Halimi has written this cameo. He has pointed out that the International Monetary Fundhas just admitted that“nearly four years after the start of the global financial crisis, confidence in the stability of the banking system as a whole has yet to be fully restored”. He then quotes US Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke who described it as “the worst financial crisis in global history, including the Great Depression” but has reminded us that no-one in the US (or in its client and comprador countries for that matter) has been charged with any crime. [Bernanke was quoted by Jeff Madrick in“The Wall Street Leviathan”, The New York Review of Books, New York, 28 April 2011.]

Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and J P Morgan all stood to gain by the collapse of the high-risk investments they warmly recommended to their clients. They got off with a fine at worst; more often they got a bonus. In fact Halimi is needlessly polite, for the criminals-in-chief have not only got off with bonuses, they have continued to be permitted to ply their destructive trade in developing countries and in the commodity trading arenas.

Eight hundred bankers were prosecuted and jailed after the fraud-related US Savings and Loans failures in the late 1980s, said Halimi. “Now the power of the banks, increased and concentrated by restructuring, is so great that they seem immune to prosecution in any state impeded by public debt. Future White House candidates, including Barack Obama, are already begging Goldman Sachs to fund their election campaigns; the head of BNP Paribas has threatened European governments with a credit squeeze if they make any serious attempt to regulate the banks; Standard & Poor’s, the agency that awarded its highest rating of AAA to Enron, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns and many junk bonds, plans to downgrade the US rating if Washington fails to deliver public spending cuts.”

What the IMF calls the World Economic Outlook, this is the 2011 April issue, as inconsequential as the last.

So, it is not only immunity. The criminals-in-chief are revealed as actually dictating social policy to the countries of the developed world. In France, the Socialists complain that “governments devoted more resources to rescuing the banks and financial institutions in the year after the subprime crisis than the world spent on aid to third world countries over 50 years” [this was in L’hebdo des socialistes, 16 April 2011].

But the remedies they propose are pathetic (a 15% bank surcharge) or pious hopes (abolish tax havens, establish a public rating agency, tax financial transactions), which rely on unlikely “joint action by the member states of the European Union”.

What should have been a crisis too far came to nothing, Halimi has concluded. He has quoted Andrew Cheng, chief adviser to the China Banking Regulatory Commission, as having said that this passive attitude is connected to a “capture problem”, which is states in thrall to their financial system [“Big Winners in Crises: the Banks”, International Herald Tribune, 13 April 2011]. Too often political leaders behave like bankers’ puppets, anxious not to spoil the party. I would have expected Monde Diplo to show some teeth here, for this is in most democracies called treason, and the punishment must match the crime.